Spider-man the movie countdown: T-minus 2.5 days and counting….

Well, I decided to take a contract for a local company, doing some programming
work that should keep me busy for a bit, and pay a bit, but nothing special. Of
course, them getting me the correct files for me to actually start
working would be even more helpful.

While I’ve been waiting however, I’ve gotten a lot of work on my resume done.
At first I just made different versions, a C programmer version, a Perl
programmer version, a general computer guy version, and so on. I started
thinking that it’d be just awsome if there was a way I could abstract the
information from the presentation. IE: Instead of having to create and
maintain a “short” version and a “long” version of each one (one is point form
the other has point form and long blathering paragraphs about stuff that no one
will ever read), I could just have something that defined that when I wanted to
create the short version, the extra information simply wouldn’t be included.
Not having to actually code the HTML and/or style that the resume looks like (a
la CSS)
would be nice too. While searching for a good XML editor, I found a very cool XML resume library that
(potentially) does everything I want. I haven’t gotten as far as using it on a
completed resume yet, only as far as getting 90% through re-writing my resume in
XML (which I now realize, is the coolest thing since sliced bread).
I’ll put some online when I’m done.

Gym morning too. Owie. I’m up to a run of 20 minutes at 6.8mph. I talked to
Brent in the gym this morning (he’s one of the weight room helper-dudes) and
found out something interesting. Basically the last while of running out has
been completely wasted if I wanted weight loss (which I do). Apparently the
sort of running I’m doing is only really burning calories, which is fine, but
for actual weight loss, you want to burn fatty acids (I think that’s what
they’re called) (which I have plenty of 🙂 To do this, you go slower, for
longer. IE: 35-45 minutes at a moderately paced walk… “an easy day” he said.
I’ve gone on the “fat burner” setting on the treadmill a few times, and felt
nothing and noticed no difference, and gave up, figuring that feeling my body
sweat and heart pound were doing more. Apparently though, I didn’t go for long
enough! He said he has a chart that shows that at the lower speed/heartrate,
the burning of these fatty acids is something like 33% higher than at the higher
speed. So work less, burn more I guess (cheesy as it sounds). So tomorrow I’ll
save my gym ticket and walk around the block, not run, and do that for a week or
two and see how it works. If it’s still a hopeless case, apparently Brent does
1 on 1 training for his “real” job, and depending on $, I may take him up on
that.

Damn, cats are cute. I’m in the bathroom, and Zoon comes up, wanders around a bit, then
jumps up on the sink. She looks up at the shelves beside the sink, stands on
her hind legs, gives a short sharp “mew!” that I know to mean “ok, I wanna get
up there!” then makes a big jump and gets to the second highest shelf. A few
seconds later she’s up on the top shelf (there’s a gap at the back) and has
herself almost stuck in the half empty 24 pack of toilet paper. She works
herself loose, then lies down on some spare napkins, and looks very happy with
herself.